In fact, it’s possible to read Oates’s Norma Jeane Baker–“Marilyn” is a persona Norma Jeane fears and loathes–as an oblique portrait of the artist. Although we see the actress hard at work, other characters repeatedly deny that she’s acting: she seems to them a sort of idiot savant who channels rather than creates her characters. That’s about the way many readers see the famously prolific Oates (this is at least her 33rd novel): a writer so gifted with inspiration she seems freakish, even laughable.
A sexist reaction? Wouldn’t a similarly gifted male writer seem heroic? It’s telling that Oates makes Norma Jeane the target of anxious male laughter and afflicts her with some of the most egregious oinkers in all literature, from sexually predatory movie people to the fictionalized DiMaggio, who hits her (“sweet as any home run”) to the fictionalized JFK, who in the throes of orgasm calls her a “dirty c–t.” What reader would want to line up with these creeps against a female visionary or her creator?
The one male character who’s not a cartoon is the fictionalized Arthur Miller. Oates pits Norma Jeane’s insight against his doggedness–of which he’s touchingly aware. “Of the Playwright’s critics, he himself was the harshest. He knew… he lacked the genius of poetry that is quicksilver, magic, unwilled.” The costive, page-a-day Playwright is just the kind of writer Oates is not, yet her vision is large enough to contain him. He treats Norma Jeane with condescension and incomprehension, but it’s a failure of imagination, not of human decency. And it’s his failure, not Oates’s.
“Blonde” can be inadvertently funny, heavy-handed and sometimes baffling, as when an “Agency” hit man spies on Marilyn long before her affair with JFK makes her a plausible target. But Norma Jeane is a great character: already broken and ruined in childhood yet gifted with a heart, a will and a secret rage that sustain her for longer than we’d have thought. The poor plodding Playwright could never have dreamed her up. Since Oates dreamed up the both of them, she gets the last laugh.
BlondeJoyce Carol Oates (HarperCollins) 752 pages. $27.50
